Gamer Philosopher: Why Play Is The New R&D For Brands [PSFK 2014]

Jamin Warren, former Wall Street Journal reporter and founder of Kill Screen, a video game arts and culture company, spoke at PSFK CONFERENCE 2014 about how games are shaping the way people think and as such need to be approached with a culture study.

Warren’s company, Kill Screen, was born out of a conversation he had with a WSJ editor who said, “I don’t get this video games thing.” At the time, Grand Theft Auto IV was the best-selling entertainment property and games were clearly a part of the Western cultural dialogue. This motivated Warren to look at video games as individual culture unto itself, because we had no clear idea of what that meant, when compared with film or design culture. As such, Warren thinks that the potential of gaming is to grow into that space, that the future of video games isn’t technology, but rather culture.

Warren’s central thought in his talk is that video games are the new research and development for future-facing brands. Games are desire-based use cases for technology. If you watch what’s happening in games, you’ll see future trends. He presented a framework to think about how games are being incorporated into our everyday lives: Game design is a system of thinking that could have influenced the ‘Lean Startup’ methodology; games streamed online like Twitch Plays Pokemon are blurring the line between spectator and participator; and games as design objects in the MoMA show their impact in how we view the world around us.

You can watch the rest of Warren’s talk below about how Mark Zuckerberg recognizes thats are an end and not a means: